Digital cameras are getting far better during the years. They offer highest pixel resolution and have been equippend better lenses to make quality full screen pictures, but sometimes you need some post processig to bring out the most of your shot. There are several applications are available on the market to install them on your PC and make the corrections. Furtunately, besides the expensive professional tools, there are several image editing applications that could be downloaded from the web for free.

One of the most popular alternative of Adobe’s Photoshop suite is GIMP, an open source photo editing tool that available for Windows, Mac, Linux and several other platforms. Although you need to imstall certain plugins to get the best performance, it brings the most compatibility with other applications. The main disadvantage of GIMP is the orney interface that is really complex to use for beginners.
The most important part of the GIMP user interface is the main image area that could be stretched to fullscreen, but other parts as Toolbox and Layers can be attached to its side to handle together. An irritating feature that clicking one of the x icons on some panel closes the entire application. Other than that I personally dislike in the Mac version that first I need to click on the Toolbox get it focus and be able to select an other tool what I used.

Apart from the facts mentioned above, GIMP includes the usual text editor, brush collection and coloring tool that you find in Photoshop as well and it also supports layers and gives the flexibility that are not offered by the most free image editing applications. The Clone tool gives easy re-touching options with picking and pasting other parts of the picture and several other Photoshop features included as well.

The very best part of GIMP that raises the application to the professional ones the ultimate flexibility via the several plugins that are available online. The wide variety of plugin selection let you add all Photoshop feature to the program, starting from the basic Anti-alias effect to the advanced Web Optimizing and publishing feature or the notable Liquid Rescale.

Summarily we can state that GIMP is not for beginners. It’s an ideal free application for those who are willing to take the time to explore all thrilling features and want process their full screen pictures without spending hundreds of dollars to purchase an Adobe Photoshop license.